Dreaming in Colors
by nine miles to go
Summary: Arthur made a mistake. It's an entire year after the Fischer job, but the last thing he expects is Ariadne's forgiveness.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own Inception.

* * *

Dreaming In Color

It's a year after the Fischer job the next time he sees her. There she is, on a street corner in the middle of New York, plain as day. It's enough to make him brush the pocket of his pants with his hand, enough to make him need the security of his totem to make sure she isn't a dream. But he knows he wouldn't dream of her this way.

She's a mess. It's dark and it's raining and she's halfheartedly dangling an arm out for a cab, and even from here he sees her lips thinning in frustrating the way they did when she was poring over her models last year. But nothing else about her seems recognizable. She has traded in those jeans that sagged too low and left too much of her torso bare (merely an observation) and that silly scarf she wore for a pencil skirt, a severe-looking collared blouse, and stilettos she can barely wobble on. She looks like a little girl trying to play dress-up. It's pathetic, but it endears her.

Like a magnet he is drawn to her, already crossing the street before he can make a conscious decision to move. The closer her gets the more uneasy he feels. Something is wrong. She carries herself like a bruise, holds her limbs too tightly against herself, and casts her eyes downward. It's certainly no way to hail a cab, let alone live.

Already he's imagining how he'll approach her. He'll reach the corner and sidle up next to her easily, and in her distraction it might take her a few moments to realize he's sheltering her with his umbrella. Then, perplexed, she'll look up and catch his eye. A beat will pass as her brown eyes lock on his. He'll smirk at her, and maybe she'll feel at ease for just a moment, seeing that he is in control of the situation even though she is a disaster. For that moment he will be the rock in her stormy seas, and once that moment has sunk in he'll say something short, something witty, something perfect, and she'll smile like she used to.

By the time he reaches the corner she's already spilling into a taxi, completely and hopelessly unaware of his pursuit. He stands on the sidewalk, feeling stupid, and as the cab drives away he catches a glimpse of her through the window—watches as her shoulders sink, her chin wobbles, and a fat tear rolls down her cheek.

He sees her face long after she leaves his sight.

* * *

It doesn't take long to track her down. She's interning with a prestigious architecture firm in the city, not too far from the street corner where he saw her, and living in a pit a good hour away. It's evident that he has too much time on her hands when he starts memorizing her routine: she's out the door by seven in the morning and doesn't leave the building until eight at night, barely managing to scrape in excuses for meals from convenience store across the street.

He's stalking her. His next assignment doesn't start for a month because, yet again, they need another architect. They lose them easily, but none were as big a loss as Ariadne.

Several times he has struck up the nerve to approach her again, but every time something stops him. The curve of her neck tilted toward the ground, the way he caught her heaving the world's weariest sigh, the knot of her eyebrows as she stared out the window of a coffee shop and ignored the tea cup and the gridded pad and pencil in front of her. She's sad. Lonely, even. He wants to fix her but he knows that after what happened he doesn't have the right.

After a week of revolving around her he tells himself to quit. He has three weeks until the assignment so he fills his days running through central park, writing anonymous pieces on his theories on the subconscious, and dreaming.

He dreams now. He never used to, not even as a child, before he could ever have fathomed what his subconscious was capable of. But ever since the Fischer job he has not only dreamed, but dreamed in bright, vivid colors—dreamed every night—dreamed of _her._

It's two weeks after he runs into her that he fears he is blurring the line between dreams and reality because he goes to her apartment, knocks on the door, and kisses her, and the kiss lasts and lasts and every part of him is unfathomably and irrevocably devoted to feeling the heat of her against him before he wakes up, his heart pounding miserably in his chest, mocking him.

His totem becomes an obsession. He is ashamed by how quickly he succumbs to his own desires, even if it is only dreaming, and he is ashamed for having them in the first place. Constantly he is checking his pockets for the totem's familiar weight, because he guiltily thinks to himself that it's okay if it's not real. It's okay to shut the door and pin her to the wall and skim a hand up her skirt as long as it isn't really happening, as long as he isn't actually going to her apartment and doing it to the actual object of his obsession, as long as it's only pretend.

* * *

He's running in Central Park when he feels his cell phone vibrating in his pocket.

"Eames," says Arthur.

"How did you know it was me?"

"Details are my specialty." Arthur slows his pace to a walk and smirks. "And you forgot to block the caller ID this time."

"Cute. I've been trying to get in touch with you for weeks. Where are you?"

"Around."

"Around what? An encyclopedia of cheeky ambiguities?"

Arthur kicks at a stray rock in his path. "What do you need, Eames?"

"The architect we signed on for the next job—"

He feels his heart thud one solitary beat, because he knows the gist of what Eames is going to say and in his traitorous mind immediately flashes to Ariadne.

"He's not going to work out."

"Should I bother asking?" Arthur sits down on one of the public benches. Not too far off is a woman feeding the pigeons and a day school of screaming kids running around on the grass. He watches them absentmindedly, trying to ignore the impulse pumping through his veins and collecting in his fists. He wants to tell Eames he found her. He wants to tell him he'll get Ariadne and that everything will work out for the best.

He can't.

Eames sighs. "I don't think I can find somebody else in time for you to brief them."

"Try."

Eames hangs up then, because he knows Arthur has nothing left to say on the matter. Arthur stands up from the bench and tucks the phone back into his pocket, feeling the weighted die between the pads of his fingers before continuing his run.

* * *

The more he tries to avoid her the closer to her he gets. He lies to himself and says he's watching out for her, that it's a big city with trouble lurking in every corner, but at her age he knows she is perfectly capable of handling herself.

It's a Sunday when she catches him. There's a tiny little dive by her apartment that serves coffee after clubbing hours and she always sits there on weekend mornings and drinks it (one cream and one sugar packet, the brown one) with her sketchpad and an enormous folder of paperwork he assumes is related to her internship. On these mornings she looks like Ariadne again, and wears her hair loose and her jeans saggy and ties that ridiculous scarf around her neck.

He feels greedy and almost like a thief, watching her through the windows, stealing the privacy she has no idea he has compromised. So when she finally looks up and makes eye contact with him, he figures he deserves it for being so selfish and assuming he has the right to pry after what he did last year.

It feels like slow motion. He would say it felt like a dream, but by now he has trouble disassociating the feeling of dreaming from the feeling of living. He watches helplessly as her eyes wander inevitably in his direction, and he can't move, there's no place to go and no way to obscure the fact that he is blatantly staring at her through the grimy glass.

Her face immediately burns a bright red hue and her mouth drops opens with some sort of lost intention. In her shock she almost lets the pad slide to the floor but she grabs it just in time, breaking eye contact with him for just a split second.

He takes that moment to run. It's stupid and childish and impulsive, but he runs away, looking ridiculous as he sprints along the dirty street in his three piece suit and loafers.

"Arthur!"

He hears her call his name and it feels like the wind has been knocked out of him. For a moment it feels like he'll never breathe again, but he keeps running. There is some sort of panic swelling in his chest that he's never felt before, not even during the worst and most hopeless extractions, and all he can think to do is get as far away as he can.

"Please, Arthur, wait!"

The words just barely reach his ears. She's an entire block away, but he doesn't dare look back to confirm. He doesn't stop until he knows there is nobody in sight, until he is certain she has lost his trail, until he is certain that he, the man who can find anybody, has lost her.

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Next chapter to come sooooon :)


	2. Chapter 2

He's ashamed. He pictures the astonishment on her round face the moment he wakes up every morning and hears the echo of her voice calling out to him long after he should be asleep. His dreams are muddled scenes with her that drift in and out of sequence and leave him feeling empty and unfulfilled in the waking world.

He shouldn't have been so stupid. He shouldn't have let her catch him. No—he shouldn't have let her leave a year ago, when it counted the most.

Another week goes by and he doesn't even feel it. Eames calls again. He has found an architect, and expects Arthur in Washington D.C. in a few days to train the new guy. Arthur feels the tug of his obligation to travel down there, to do his job, but it's not enough to make him leave New York. He can't stand the idea of leaving her in this city. She might be gone when he comes back, and he knows he would never look for her if she left, because she hadn't wanted him to find her in the first place.

On a particularly muggy Wednesday she doesn't walk past the subway station he sits at to watch her on her way to work. He tries to brush it off, and even retreats from his lookout bench with every intention to spend the entire day holed up in the hotel he's barely living in.

It doesn't work. By nightfall he's out there again, waiting to see if she'll pass by on her way home. When she doesn't he feels his chest constrict with an almost imperceptible, controlled kind of panic. Without thinking it through his feet are sweeping over the pavement, hailing a cab. It's a half hour drive and he can't stand the uselessness of just sitting in the back on the smelly upholstery. His heart is beating like he needs to run, like his arms and legs need to pump and his muscles need to rip with the supreme effort to find her.

It's irrational. He understands that, and even as he understands it, even as he clutches his totem and knows that he is in the waking world, he still panics.

When the cab finally pulls up to her apartment building he practically throws the cash at the driver and leaves before the man can count it and realize how much Arthur overpaid him.

There's a security guard in the front desk. "Excuse me," says the guard, and Arthur stops in his track, feeling his own stupidity seep in. Usually he is so suave, so contained, and in any other circumstances—surely in circumstances more dire than this—he might have been able to slip up the rickety stairs unnoticed.

"Well?" says the guard, when Arthur just stares at him.

"I'm looking for someone," he says breathlessly.

"What room?"

"I'm not sure."

The guard rolls his eyes, making a show of his irritation. "Do you have a name?"

"Ariadne," he says, and the feels weird on his tongue, like some sort of hidden secret he revealed to himself after not saying it for so long.

The guard laboriously pulls out a binder and flicks through it. "There's no Ariadne here."

For the first time in a long time Arthur is frustrated enough to want to hit something. He considers the trouble he'd go through for kicking a hole into the peeling walls of this dump and decides against it, feeling his bones quake in protest to his logic.

"I know she's here," he says defensively. He makes a break for the stairs.

"Don't make me call the cops," the man barks, finally getting up from the desk.

"You don't understand."

"No, I don't. And that's why you have to leave. Now."

* * *

The hardest part is waiting. He stands by the side of the building, rigid as a board, barely even moving. Two hours pass. It's a ridiculous notion that she would bother leaving the apartment this late, even assuming that she is actually inside, but he waits anyway, determining that he'll wait until morning if that's what it takes.

When a taxi pulls up next to the building he doesn't even look at it, his eyes focused on the front entrance as if she will magically appear there, drawn to him.

"What are you doing here?"

As quiet and raspy as it sounds, he recognizes her voice in an instant, and he near whips his head out of place in an effort to see her face. It feels like he's spent the past year stretching a rubber band too far and now that she's so close to him, mere feet away, the elastic has mercifully snapped back into place.

"Ariadne," he says stupidly. "Your eye."

She reaches a self-conscious hand up to the swelling bruise and he sees that her other arm is in a sling as well.

"What happened?" he asks, already blaming himself.

"I . . ." She's embarrassed. "I was sleepwalking last night. And I tripped."

He wants to touch her cheek and make it better. He wants to hold her until her eyes lose that wide, scared look and she stops holding her arms too close to her sides.

"Sleepwalking?" he repeats.

She starts to nod, then shakes her head instead, staring at him in bewilderment. "Arthur. What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you," he says honestly.

The hurt in her eyes is somewhat masked when she commits her entire face into a twisted scowl. "You ran away from me," she accuses.

He doesn't say anything for a moment. He doesn't know what he's doing. Coming up with an excuse? He's better than that, he knows, because there is no suitable excuse for his behavior, and trying to find one would only make her lose respect for him.

"I'm sorry. It caught me off guard, when you saw me in the window."

She sighs. He can see just a hint of her chest through the buttons of her coat and it looks almost concave. She seems like even more of a wisp of a person than he remembers her being, and he would call her fragile, but the way she looks ready to tear his eyes out makes him think the better of it.

"I wasn't talking about the coffee shop. I was talking about Los Angeles."

He balks, surprised by how much venom he hears in her voice. In mere moments she has rendered him speechless, and although he has imagined and quite literally dreamed of this confrontation for months now, he has never thought it would be like this.

She searches his face for a few moments. Waits for him to say something. Then he sees a slow and bitter acceptance cross her face, as she understands he has nothing to say. "Fine," she says. "Great. Good night, Arthur."

"Wait."

She's already halfway up the front steps, her back turned to him. "I'm sick of waiting."

He walks up the steps tentatively. It's almost frightening the way she won't turn around, the way she won't move. He remembers how Cobb would dream, how his vision of his children would always be obscured and out of reach, and he suddenly has to stifle the fear that this is the pivotal moment that will forever define him if he screws it up.

Since his words aren't enough he grabs her hand, the one that isn't in the sling. He curls her fingers into his and is struck with the familiarity of it, remembering holding this same small, cold hand just a year before and then letting it go.

When she doesn't pull her hand away from him he walks up the stairs until he's level with her again. She turns her cheek, unwilling to let him see her face.

"Let me stay the night," he says gently.

Her shoulders tighten, indignant. "How stupid do you think I am?"

"It's not like that," he says. His face is hot with embarrassment. "I just want to make sure you're okay."

"I'm fine." Her voice is like steel. She pries her hand out of his, and maybe he's just imagining it, but she exerts some small pressure and lingers before she lets go.

"Well, if you won't let me in for your own sake, do it for mine. I don't want you to be alone tonight."

She bites at her lower lip to keep it from trembling visibly. He knows exactly what she's thinking about, and lowers his voice, partially in shame and partially to assure her. "I know it's asking more than I deserve."

It's starting to drizzle, but neither of them moves.

"The couch smells bad," she finally says. "And I don't have any spare pillows."

He supposes this isn't the ideal time to remind her that he's done a good portion of sleeping in a lawn chair. He smiles just slightly in relief and it feels like his face is cracking open, so he stops before she can catch him. By the time she turns to face him there is mascara dripping down her face from the rain and his face is stoic as a wall.

The guard glares at him on their way up, but doesn't try to stop them. Ariadne silently leads him up to her apartment, which is tiny and barely furnished, save for the bed and the threadbare couch. In the tiny kitchen is a coffee strainer full of soggy, used coffee grounds and an open box of crackers. On the counter are stacks of papers and layout plans. Her clothes are all laid out on the floor of the bedroom instead of hanging in the closet, as if she never meant to stay for as long as she has.

Staring at the disorganized, near empty apartment he can't help but remember the hotel in Los Angeles. Her clothes tucked neatly into her closet, her one pair of sneakers lined up by the bed, looking almost dainty next to his loafers. This mess, it isn't like her.

"Here."

She hands him a blanket. It's ragged, but it's clean, and he would just as soon not have a blanket if it means he can stay here with her. He strips down to his undershirt and boxers and makes a show of getting ready to sleep, but he knows that he won't. For the most part she ignores him, brushing her teeth and combing her hair and barely even throwing off her shoes before flopping back on her bed and burying her head in the pillow.

The door to her room is still open, so he has almost a clear view of her. The kitchen light is still on and he wonders if it bothers her. He shifts awkwardly before asking. "Should I turn off the light?"

"Mmmf," she says, her voice muffled.

Dutifully he gets up and shuts off the light. "Good night," he says, and by that time she either chooses not to reply or has already fallen asleep.

He lets about fifteen minutes pass before he hears light snoring. He almost smirks at the memory of her snoring in the warehouse on her very first day with Cobb. How she looked like a perfect porcelain doll on that filthy lawn chair, and how her chest rose and fell in small bursts, and how every so often her the angelic sound of her breath would hitch in a tiny, inelegant snore.

Once he's sure she's asleep he starts rifling through the files and paperwork scrambled on her kitchen counter. At first it's all blueprints and layouts of office buildings and chain restaurants and malls, courtesy of her internship. It's nice, it's professional, and it's very well done, but it isn't inspired. It isn't Ariadne. What he sees in these pages is a promising architect who wears her hair in a severe bun and wears heels as tall and intimidating as the towers she builds.

What he looks for is the girl who wore scarves in the summertime and scuffed up sneakers in fancy hotels, and didn't imagine things that could be contained on a simple blueprint or even in a three dimensional model.

He doesn't find her in the pages. Not even one hint of her, not after hours of poring through a year's worth of notes and scribbles and figures.

Something glints at him from the sink. He is about to ignore it, assuming it's silverware, but its gold color is distinct enough to make him double-take. He walks over slowly, not quite believing it.

It's Ariadne's totem. The chess piece. Laying abandoned in the sink.

He's about to reach out and touch it, but thinks better of it, drawing back as if the air around it scalds him. He knows better than to touch somebody else's totem. But he's never been good with boundaries and when it comes to Ariadne.

"Arthur?"

He is so astonished by her discarded totem that he doesn't even notice her footsteps padding into the kitchen. For a man whose life revolves around details, he sure has missed the important ones in the past few hours.

"You're up," he says, ever the observant one.

"Where is everybody?"

"Where . . ." He stares at her. "Where's who?"

She's looking at him without quite looking at him. Her eyes are sort of glazed over, her eyelids only half open. There's something stilted in her walk when she steps over to him, and that's when he realizes it.

"Oh," he says. "You're sleepwalking."

"We should probably leave," she says back.

He nods. "Come on, then," he says, keeping his voice low. "Let's go back."

As gently as he can, he grips his hands on her shoulders and starts to guide her out of the kitchen.

"This is the wrong way," she says. But she reaches out and grabs one of his hands and holds it tight, letting him lead her.

"It's a different way. It's okay."

They're in her bedroom doorway when she stops. "Where's Cobb?"

His chest constricts and he almost forgets to keep her moving. He takes a deep breath and nudges her ever so slightly, compelling her to move toward the bed. "I don't know," he tells her honestly.

"Are we dreaming?"

He chuckles at the awe in her voice. "Just a little."


End file.
